A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

Remember, you are as dispensable as the most indispensable king of kings, the mighty lord of silly worldly men.

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort, ' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.

When I look at my bookcase and see one book after the other upon its shelves, I think to myself, There is a God.

The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.

The ideal of warriorship is that the warrior should be sad and tender, and because of that, the warrior can be very brave as well.

James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.

How can a reason which hates God be called sound?

Democritus said, words are but the shadows of actions.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough.